I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word but I can see nothing wrong in "master". Not a single moment in my life I thought about slavery when hearing/seeing the word "master". Should we also rename master degrees perhaps?
By going down the road of agreeing to some words to be removed you're then imposing a presumption of guilt on anyone who refuses to remove said words. If I maintain some software that uses the word slave or blacklist and I don't accede to making the changes to remove it, or agree to approve a PR that does the same, then it's presumed I am stubborn or worse still, racist. Despite the usage of the word being completely innocent.
Of course, context is everything, which only proves the point. You cannot systematically ban certain words.
What made me think more about slavery was the materials that go into computers like cobalt and sulfur. Someone has to go down into the sulfur mine and get that for us. That's an actual master/slave relationship that is going on right now to power all our fantastic infrastructure.
But so much industry has depended on sulfur for so many years that this debate is much deeper and more complex. The ugly truth is that someone far away has to be enslaved for us to live comfortably.
Bring that debate to the front instead and we might find a technical solution to it.
But it's always cheaper to find a desperate person than to maintain a robot that is being attacked by gas and sulfur daily.
And...it still wouldn't matter to those people at all because it wouldn't change their specific situation!
This is a pretty insipid argument.
But the parent argument is valid, you just somehow missed it despite it being descibed and illustrated.
github's action isn't absurd because it doesn't change any random person's situation. It's absurd because of the specific people whose specific situations are not improved.
I disagree, however I'm not a native English speaker. It is the most descriptive single word describing this mode of working. We can't ban master/slave as a word or we will loose understanding of what it means. Another poster already mentioned that there are actual human slaves in existence today. I once heard in our time there are more human slaves than ever (mostly due to there being more people overall). It is sad that large companies like Microsoft(Github) choose to waste energy on such pointless activities instead of actually doing something about modern slavery.
Microsoft is still in unique position of being able to pressure hardware makers. Why don't they pressure them into at least trying to improve conditions of actual slaves that mine cobalt and other rare materials at the bottom of their supply chain?
It often isn't. It's not uncommon that "replica" or "secondary" actually make more sense.
Secondary means backup or parity module.
Slave means neither of those things. A slave, in technical terms, means a "dumb" worker (meaning it doesn't make its own decisions about how it operates within the greater system) that is controlled by another module in the system (often called a "master").
And no, "worker" isn't descriptive because it doesn't specify the nature of autonomy within the system - oftentimes, a worker might autonomously pick tasks off a queue and perform work offline or something. A slave is directly, actively and imperatively given commands by another entity in the system.
Further, it is also implied that a slave has a lifetime that spans within the lifetime of the master. Workers, replicas, or secondaries do not share this trait.
"Slave" is the only word that accurately infers the technical operating aspects of such an actor within system's design.
Stop messing with our vocabulary please. We need it to do real work. Bring on the downvotes, because I know the performative woke crowd loves to ignore these facts.
Yes, and a slave database is probably better called a replica. Because that's more descriptive of what it is.
> Secondary means backup or parity module.
Or it could mean the second device on a bus, IDE master/slave for example seems to me to be better as primary/secondary (or even, first/second.)
> Further, it is also implied that a slave has a lifetime that spans within the lifetime of the master. Workers, replicas, or secondaries do not share this trait.
I dunno, that sounds to me like overloading a word unnecessarily.
> Stop messing with our vocabulary please.
No. Choosing more descriptive words is only a better thing. Stop trying to weirdly limit vocabulary, please.
I'm also very tired of being a labelled a Nazi, hence the tone.
BTW I remember Russians translating master/slave (in the IT context, e.g. primary/secondary master/slave for IDE PATA drives) as the the leading and the led.
Master copy; Remastered (music); Master of Arts/Sciences; Mastery
Etc. None of that implies a master-slave relationship.
I'd never subconsciously linked the term with human slaves, only ever really thinking of it as an abstract concept, until people started complaining about it... Part of it may be coming from a different cultural context, not being from the US though...
Edit: No! You see Ivan, it should be master and margarita!
In Dutch (both in .nl and .be), the English term 'master bedroom' was fashionable for a few years, until the stigma of that term carried over from the Anglosphere and it's now being replaced (in the woke areas of the country) with 'ouderslaapkamer', which is literally translated 'parent bedroom'. Although now that term itself is 'controversial' (not mainstream controversial, more in small hardcore circles, so I'm not sure if this will actually become an issue) because (to the best of my understanding of this objection) 'parent bedroom' implies that the 2-parents-with-children family form is normative (you can't make this up if you tried to), which it shouldn't be.
Not sure what my point is, maybe that using 'master' for 'main' is no longer outright commonly accepted usage?
But the objections I read about last summer (tried looking but I can't find it any more) were moral, that the term is also 'oppressive' (not sure if that's the actual term they used, that was the gist of it), basically the same arguments that are made for removing 'master' from Git, language frames our thinking etc.
Probably descended from the Latin word "magister", which (despite Rome having plenty of slaves) didn't neccersarilly refer to a slaveowner -- indeed many Roman slaves were Ludi Magister -- educated slaves that were teachers at Roman schools
Etymology of "master bedroom" seems to come from "Master's bedroom" in boarding schools, where it was the bedroom that the school master occupied (with Master having descended from Roman times)
Can you clarify this? If one machine/repo/system acts only on the orders of another, wouldn't "master" and "slave" be clear, descriptive choices of words?
Really I'm not the best person to judge though. I'm happy to be guided by people who experience racism and groups tackling the legacy of slavery. Because those things seem important whereas my terminology preferences for asymmetric nodes in a distributed system, when there are plenty of sensible alternatives, seem less so.
Slavery was really bad, and for that reason shouln't be used as a description.
There are always alternatives, like "leader and follower"
We also kill child processes. No-one's had a problem with that till now. Sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor.
Which is a worse analogy, because "following" is a choice and doesn't have to be strict, unlike slave (execute commands or get killed).
On my computer I can open a folder twice without closing it. I can't open a physical folder twice without closing.
With a race condition, no one cares if both processes started at the same time. That's not an important part of the analogy.
Even your point about killing doesn't really fit with the metaphor. Historically, whipping would be the most common punishment.
I do agree with your idea that the metaphor has to be clear. Modbus replace master/slave with client/server, which tends to confuse people used to the old analogy. It's not ideal, but neither is referring back to that time we could trade people.
I’m playing devil’s advocate. I don’t have strong feelings on this specific change, but I can see my line of thinking surprisingly absent in this entire thread.
A Marxist would chuckle at the notion that Microsoft would be removing the word "owner" for being offensive.